Uriel Weinreich

Uriel Weinreich was a Polish and American linguist who specialized in Yiddish studies, sociolinguistics and dialectology, credited as one of the first linguists to recognize the phenomenon of interlanguage, in which second-language learners treat forms from their native language as equivalent to target-language forms. Born in Wilno in 1926, he earned his degrees at Columbia University, where he later held the Atran Professorship of Yiddish, mentoring linguists including William Labov and Marvin Herzog before his death from cancer in 1967 at age 40. His works include Languages in Contact: Findings and Problems and, as co-author, Empirical Foundations for a Theory of Language Change.